Anyone who knows India knows how strong the vitality of spirit is here even under the worst circumstances. Unlike the rest of the people who had come to Bombay to protest and leave , Hari stays back and endures the ups and downs of city life which is brand new to him.

Lila and Hari, aged 13 and 12, struggle to keep the family, including two young sisters, going when their mother is ill and their father usually the worse for drink. The ice-man comes and Hari collects the ice chips and puts them in a bag before hurrying towards home before the ice melts.His sisters had been looking after their mother with the help of the kind DeSilvas and this affects their father in a positive way. The villagers receive the news that a factory may open in town, and many boys wait eagerly to sign up for work. Village By The Sea is an amazing read for many reasons, but mainly for the perfect blend of description and narrative that it manages to be. When he gets home, he finds that his mother’s condition has improved and that his father is slowly beginning to recover from his alcoholism.

Hari had forgotten all about them, and he begins to have feverish thoughts about their lifestyle—could he be a part of it? Even though he tells himself, “He could not afford dreams, he must be practical and think out a scheme” (45), he is a bit “excited to think that life held so many possibilities” (48). And I suppose they're what makes life wonderfully livable there: the warmth and the color and the exuberance one misses elsewhere.

Shahani continues, “Desai's Bombay contains depictions of the stark squalour of the city's pavement dwellers, but they are hazy shadows—symbols rather than actual people.

The book had a lot of potential to branch out into descriptions but narrowed its focus on only one family, leaving many questions unanswered. Biju says that fishing is the village tradition, and always will be, and even if it wasn’t, they still have their fertile crop fields. Boys, fishermen, farmers, women, and all sorts of diverse villagers have gathered to hear a young man speak. The characters in this conflict are Remedios, the healer, of the small town who listens to people’s stories and gives them advice. With a wide range of homes available we are certainly expecting this new village to be a real success.Biju has hired workmen from Alibagh, the district capital, even though the Thul men have been building boats all their lives. Since the children’s mother is very sick and confined to her bed most of the time, thirteen-year-old Lila and twelve-year-old Hari have taken over parental duties for their younger siblings, Bela and Kamal. Living in a small village by the sea, the children have to adapt to difficult circumstances that include a drunken father, a terribly ill mother, and extreme poverty. Lila’s mother wakens and asks Lila if Hari, Bela, and Kamal have gone to work and school respectively. The Indian Subcontinent in Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography of English-language Books.